The latest edition of Linux Mint was released late yesterday. Code-named Olivia, Linux Mint 15 brings the latest editions of the MATE and Cinnamon desktop environments.

This article features some screen shots from test installation of both flavors in a virtual environment.

First from Linux Mint 15 Cinnamon test installation.

The login screen is beautiful. Not only that, you can customize it any way you want.

If you don’t have a system with hardware-accelerated graphics, it will run in what’s called Software Rendering mode.

This is the default desktop. According to sources from deep inside the Linux Mint team, this is the best desktop background ever designed by man, or woman. That’s why it will be the default desktop on all releases of Linux Mint or Linux Mint Debian from now till Thy Kingdom Come.

Fortunately, changing the background takes just four mouse clicks. And there are many more visually-appealing backgrounds to choose from.

Yep, this is one of them.

The desktop in Expo mode.

One of the highlights of the latest edition of the Cinnamon desktop is a slightly revamped System Settings center. This is the view in normal mode.

In advanced mode, you get a lot more administrative tools.

Another highlight is the Software Sources manager, which makes it brain-dead easy to manage software sources on the system. No need to do anything from the command-line, when it comes to adding repos or PPAs to the system.

The Software Manager is still the same. Still boots up kinda slow.

Partial list of Featured applications.

From Linux Mint 15 MATE, comes these screen shots.

Yep, same desktop background.

After using the latest editions of GNOME 3 and Cinnamon, the MATE desktop kinda feels very old.

This looks much better.

The same desktop with an applications view of the menu.

The MATE Control Center is still the same.

A review of this latest edition of Linux Mint MATE and Cinnamon will be published next week Monday. You may download 32- or 64-bit installation images for both flavors from here.

Digital Ocean is a VPS/Cloud hosting provider. For just $5 per month, you can get yourself a Cloud server with 512 MB of RAM, 20 GB super-fast SSD, free snapshots, plus backups for a minimal fee. All via a simple graphical interface.